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On Counting Website Traffic
Logic Bomb writes: "The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting article about measuring website traffic. This is kind of an obnoxious issue, but it means everything to commercial websites seeking investors. Apparently the figures reported by the sites themselves through analysis of server logs are often much higher than the ones given by firms like Media Metrix (whose numbers I see all the time in articles from Cnet and the like). The basic dispute is over whether sampling, a la Nielsen, is appropriate for the web. It seems counterproductive to purposely use an innacurate statistical measure when exact counts are readily available, but I can't imagine many things easier to fake than a server log. Anyone have a good idea about how to approach this?"
If someone is willing to take the hosting site's word at face value with regard to eyeball real-estate, then I've got some banner ads (and a bridge) to sell them.
And this is the really sad part. The information age has created a new type of cyber-criminal. The false information broker. Society is moving away from products and building multi-purpose machines. As a whole were're more service oriented than we used to be. This means all our assets and business transactions are on paper. Nothing tangible is being exchanged. And typically we have such a high volume of data being transferred that it can't be checked for 100% accuracy. I signed up for one of those "saver" cards at a local grocery store(part of a national chain) and totally faked the information on the signup sheet(I get enough spam as it is, thank you very much) No one caught it, even though an application with an address of 1600 Penn Ave in Ft. Worth, Utah with a completely made up Zip code and a Texas DL number showing up at a store in Tennessee _should_ have raised an eyebrow or two.
So now we have the buyers and the sellers. A buyer can't always trust a seller and a seller can't always trust a buyer. Enter the middleman who keeps both parties honest. Am I the only one saddened by the necessity of a service like this?
Steven
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- Yesterday, 1308 people visited your site. Of those:
- 183 weren't paying attention at all anyway.
- 22 were your competitors.
- 318 were poor college students drooling over, rather than contemplating buying, your products.
- 139 were actually looking for pornography and left your site immediately.
- 38 were webdesigners stealing your HTML code.
- 133 were here to compare your prices with the competitors. Of those, 29 decided to buy your product.
- 84 were in your target demographic, but were so stoned at the time that they didn't read your sales pitch.
- 12 people actually bought something online.
- 18 people liked your product and went out and bought some offline.
- Of those 30 people who bought something, 28 sent the URL to a total of 56 friends to show off what they had just bought. Of those friends, 3 subsequently bought something.
Ok, so where's the software which can get that data out of your server logs?Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
But when you advertise on the web, you can look at your web logs to gauge the audience - you don't need to trust their logs, or Media Metrix', or anyone else's.
In fact, by looking at your own logs, you can say, "Well, Yahoo sends 10,000 people a day to my site, but only 10 of those people buy anything.. Meanwhile, Slashdot sends 1,000 people, but 500 of them end up buying stuff."
So why are such ratings needed?
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Mod up a post Rob doesn't like and you'll never mod again
Carnivore is the answer. Let the feds provide accurate and unbiased information!
What I'm blocking out so far is:
our company's internal IP traffic
images
funky robots like Keynote-Perspective that the old webmaster had let loose on our sites.
This gives us some numbers I have confidence in (even though they're 10x less than the numbers the old guy was producing through Webtrends), but I'd like to find out what others are doing for making their own web stats.
Thanks,
Steve
Excuse me while I go "Grumpy old man". This is an old, old problem. It goes back to the days when I first started using the web. See "Why web statistics are (worse than) meaningless." It's an old article. That's the point.
In short, spiders, proxies and caches make it impossible to be accurate in measuring traffic. But everyone else is affected the same way. So your relative stats are relevent-- they just aren't hit-for-hit accurate.
What your server logs are really for is resource planning. They'll help you find out how much traffic your server is serving, which should help you plan bandwidth and hardware upgrades as needed.